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Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - Bill of Rights

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Preservation and Proposition

Our mission is to document the pivotal Second Amendment events that occurred in Frontier Mercersburg, and its environs, and to heighten awareness of the importance of these events in the founding of our Nation.

We are dedicated to the preservation of the place where the Second Amendment was "born" and to the proposition that the Second Amendment (the "right to bear arms") is the keystone of our Liberty and the Republic.

Monday, November 18, 2013

Barack Obama, the candidate who promised Americans in 2008 that I will not take your guns away, now, as President of the United States in 2013, has embraced the universal firearm confiscation of Australia and England schemes that saw the destruction of hundreds of thousands of registered, legal firearms that had been outlawed and taken under threat of force from licensed gun owners by their governments.

Obama revealed his gun control endgame in a Sept. 22, 2013, political speech at a solemn memorial for the 12 Washington Navy Yard victims murdered by a deranged killer on Sept. 16, 2013.

Obama coldly used the madness of a delusional lone mass-murderer to claim that the rampage ought to lead to some sort of transformation it ought to obsess us.

In the same breath, Obama defined his personal obsession and his notion of transformation for ordinary American gun owners:

That's what happened in other countries when they experienced similar tragedies. In the United Kingdom, in Australia they mobilized and they changed.
The Washington Post praised Obama's demand for transformation to an Australia-style gun roundup and destruction as commonsense.

While the U.S. media either ignored or glossed over Obama's embrace of the Aussie model for gun bans, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Sept. 23, 2013, led its coverage with this:

The U.S. president, Barack Obama, says it's time for America to follow the example of countries like Australia when it comes to gun control.

With a Sept. 23, 2013, headline, Obama hails Australian gun laws, Sky News led its coverage with: President Barack Obama has used Australia as a positive example of a country that tightened gun laws after a mass shooting.

Virtually no U.S. media outlet was honest enough to describe what actually happened to our formerly free English speaking cousins as a direct result of mass murders committed by lone, criminally insane killers.

In reaction to the murder of 16 people in Hungerford in 1987 by an insane killer, registered semi-automatic rifles in Great Britain were banned and confiscated from all licensed owners. Then, following the 1996 massacre of school children in Dunblane, Scotland, most registered handguns were declared contraband, taken and destroyed. Owners of .22-cal. handguns had been allowed to keep them at government approved facilities, but they, too, were outlawed, collected and destroyed because of the actions of two criminal lunatics.

On the heels of the Dunblane killings in 1996, an insane murderer in Australia, who obtained one of his semi-automatic rifles by killing its owner and his wife, slaughtered 34 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania.

As a result, all semi-automatic rifles, including .22s, and all semi-automatic shotguns and pump shotguns were banned, and licensed owners were required to turn them in for destruction under what the government, as in England, called a buyback.

In reality, the buybacks were thefts made possible by using pre-existing government lists of licensed owners and registered guns.

All of this explains Obama's obsessive call for universal background checks' a scheme easily morphed into gun-owner registration.

The president's notion of crafting a U.S. version of the Australian/British tyranny has not come in a vacuum. It has been preceded by a spate of articles designed to introduce the public to the concept.

Key to this propaganda push was a Jan. 16, 2013, New York Times op-ed by former Aussie Prime Minister John Howard, titled I Went After Guns. Obama Can, Too. In it, Howard touted his politics of forcibly disarming licensed law-abiding Australians:

City dwellers supported our plan, but there was strong resistance by some in rural Australia. Many farmers resented being told to surrender weapons they had used safely all of their lives. Penalizing decent, law-abiding citizens because of the criminal behavior of others seemed unfair. Many of them felt bewildered and betrayed by these new laws. I understood their misgivings. Yet I felt there was no alternative.

And Howard boasted, Almost 700,000 guns were bought back and destroyed the equivalent of 40 million guns in the United States. (Emphasis added)

Understand that Australia is perhaps the most urbanized nation in the world where coastal, non-gun-owning city dwellers dwarf rural populations who have a long firearm tradition.

But today it is those urbanites in places like Sydney who are reaping the real consequences of John Howard's multiple buybacks. Criminal violence with illegal firearms in those urban centers is soaring.

Try these headlines from one month before the U.S. Washington Navy Yard murders:

Or this from News Limited Network Aug. 2, 2013, Is Australia staring down the barrel of a gun crisis?

There is a gun battle going on in Australia. As bike gang members and drug dealers gun each other down on a regular basis, sending fear through the community, authorities seem to be fighting a losing battle to keep firearms out of their hands.

As for mass murders, Howard, who once summed up his optic on freedom saying, I hate guns, wrote in his New York Times op-ed:

The fundamental problem was the ready availability of high-powered weapons, which enabled people to convert their murderous impulses into mass killing.

People? Ordinary citizens?

The confiscatory bans were a hysterical response to the insanity of one person. One crazy person in Port Arthur. One crazy person in Hungerford. One crazy person in Dunblane. One crazy person in Aurora, Colo. One crazy person in Sandy Hook, Conn. And one crazy person at the Washington Navy Yard.

All of these killers had one thing in common: all were totally and recognizably deranged. And nobody reacted to their insanity. Nobody interceded.

In the case of the Navy Yard killer a contract IT worker, police had warned the Navy he was a violent schizophrenic hearing voices and tormented by extremely low frequency electromagnetic waves. And he had a record of firearm abuse. Yet, he held a secret security clearance and carried a valid Navy ID that allowed him free access to military installations.

And, as I said on Meet the Press, equally important in the Navy Yard killings was the lax base security in what amounts to a gun-free zone: That can't stand. We need to look at letting men and women who know firearms and are trained in them to do what they do best, which is protect and survive.

Yet Obama and his gun-ban cabal demand that millions of sane, ordinary peaceable Americans' you and me pay the price for lone sociopaths with the loss of our rights.

USA Today reported that Obama plans to bring his Australia/UK transformation and obsession to bear on the 2014 congressional elections. All I can say is Bring it on, because Americans' by the millions upon millions will fight to defend our freedom.

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It All Started Here . . .

Frontier Mercersburg in 1765 was the "birthplace" of the right we now refer to as "the Second Amendment", or, "the right to bear arms". It was here that individuals for the first time, some would say divinely, embraced the link between "Life and Liberty". . . and struck the first blow for Freedom.

Historically the right to bear arms goes back even before our founding as a nation to the Glorious Revolution of 1689 when William III agreed to the English Bill of Rights. If one can look at revolution like a volcanic eruption in nature, you understand that often from the destruction come the seeds of new human values and beliefs. In this case the independence of the human spirit, the right to know God for oneself, and to trust your conscience was hard won in this revolution of the human soul.

One crucible begets the necessity for another and on the frontier in America the right to defend ones religious beliefs was becoming the right to participate in the decisions of government that impact my "self". Freedom of the soul was becoming freedom of the heart and mind. Smith's Rebellion began as an act they justified under the rubric of defending oneself because government had failed in its obligation to protect Life, Liberty and Property. This was the first assertion of this principle aimed directly at British Military Authority as well as the incompetent government of John Penn - anywhere in the colonies.

In the end, Smith's Rebellion was the first armed resistance against British Military Rule leading up to the American Revolution. It was the first American triumph over the best military force in the world. It was the first time upon defending oneself that Americans had proclaimed we can rule ourselves.

It would be ten years before the battles at Lexington and Concord.

...Let Them Take Arms

The "Right to Bear Arms" . . .or 2nd Amendment is one of the most discussed and contentious of all the amendments of the Bill of Rights. It is, in fact, the only amendment that contains not only the seeds but the actual instruments of the revolution itself. Further, it gives real affirmation to Thomas Jefferson's quote . . .

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

It is for this reason, if no other, that the Government and its functionaries vociferously assail and obfuscate the text of this simple assertion. More, it is for this reason, and in the face of the perennial onslaught that its defense and affirmation is essential to the survival of the republic.

Frontier Mercersburg & The Justice William Smith House

The frontier town of Mercersburg, PA. in the 1760's, although typical of many settlements along the Appalachian Mountains played a pivotal role in the creation of what was to become the "Bill of Rights".

Frontiersmen like James Smith and the Black Boys, many of whom were inhabitants of the Mercersburg environs, were early participants in a series of conflicts with the British government that established principles the eventually lead to the inclusion of the "right to bear arms" in the Bill of Rights.

Much of the focus, centers on the domicile (and likely place of business) of Justice William Smith.